There is beauty in the World, Ka-ching!

Rural Maharashtra.
October 2011

Food-iee

I warned you about my sweet tooth!

Of this and that

 There are some things I think I will never be able to let go of. One of them is the memory of this shade of sun kissed green.

It stood by the road silently, watching the world go by. Its only friends, the corrugated tin walls and the parched earth.

And my fascination with trees continues. This one - "Droop dead gorgeous"

:-)

Kelva

As much as I hate to love the madness and drudgery of Mumbai, I love to speed out of city limits and peer at it from far away. I like seeing the blue of the sky, uninterrupted by upward scrambling skyscrapers. I like watching cattle amble through fields and people bustle through the weekly market. I like seeing the car lap up black, tarry kilometers as I try to pocket and preserve the green, the blue and the brown.

The drive from Mumbai to Kelva Beach is rather long (120kms), but pleasant. Getting onto NH 8 from Thane is quick and smooth in the early morning. The roads are good, but trucks and lorries of all shapes and sizes lord the roads even at this hour. Hues of gray, brown and blue dominate a major leg of the journey. There is little buzz on either side of the Highway. The concrete stares back at you squarely until you turn right at Manor Naka.

The landscape magically changes. Concrete gives way to an expanse of fields and greenery and a faint smell of the sea.

The four lane highway and the rumbling traffic is left behind. A lazier and prettier stretch, lined with trees yawned ahead, in front of us.

We finally reach a sleepy village which is Kelwe (in Marathi). The locals seem to be used to see cars revving down their narrow roads. Vada pav and Chai shops dot the roads at corners. Some new ones seemed to have sprouted recently to sell the Diwali goodies. We see colorful roadside carts selling diyas, rangoli, lanterns and crackers. The village houses carry no garish traces of glitter and other luminous monstrosities as their urban counterparts.

Our car trundles down a very narrow, rough patch and we enter what is called 'Kelva Beach Resort.'

There is nothing  good about this resort. Except may be a little bit of aesthetic sense here and there.

The final destination, the beach, sadly too is a let down. There is something distant and unfriendly about the sea here....and the sand doesn't sparkle.

 

For what it's worth, it was worth all the while. The best thing about the Kelva is definitely the drive and the sights en-route.

On Doorways

Jew Town Road,
Fort Cochin

The narrow stone cobbled streets seemed like they had meandered out of a book of illustrated Fairy Tales.Now, black tarred roads stick out only as a unsure memory.Here, feet mostly tread on age old stone, bathed in a film of sand blown over from the thin shoreline. 

Every other street corner was splashed with color or bedecked with beads, flowers, clothes or jewels.Resplendent.

In the midst of this extravagance I spotted a humble door way. Welcoming curious feet was a worn out but formerly bright yellow wall. Leading on was a cobbled stone path. Hovering over, cautiously was the blue sky.

Where will it take curious feet?
I have yet to find out.

This is as far as my camera's eye could see. 
But does another door always open when one shuts?
Is everything illuminated?

Walls, now and then

The car snakes its way around the hill, through the bastis and mandis. We are momentarily distracted by the women in their red,yellow and pink lehengas and silver chudis. A bright sun beam bounces off a metal pot carefully balanced on a woman's head. Our driver squints for a moment. He shifts from the third to the second gear. The car slowly purs up the gradient. Brown stone walls stealthily creep up against the blue of the sky. The pale blue transforms into a dramatic space as battles of yester years peek through the small windows, chiseled out of stone. Mouthfuls of the sky emerge from behind the open windows of the thick fort walls.  He tells us it was a city ravaged in the past by pillage, murder and deceit. Every window has a steep decline, going all the way down. Buckets of hot oil were poured down these slopes if an enemy tried to scale the walls to enter. What bloody walls they must have been. Now they stand as a silent relic of the city's past. Mute spectators to the unfolding of a new history.

Kerala Diaries Part II

Some funny sign boards I spotted propped up in different places in the motherland. Within a context or despite one, I think you'd still chortle. No?

Kerala Diaries

The winding drive through the ghats had made us a little dizzy. As we stepped out of the vehicle a strange mix of smells wafted through the thin mountain air. It was at once sweet, spicy, fragrant, delectable and jerky. A warm shower of yellow orchids hung over our heads. We softly began to tread through what was a Spice Garden in the mountains of Thekkady, in Kerala.

The Spice trail that we were whisked off on was led by an exuberant, dramatic gentleman called Paul. He took us through a long winding tour of a spice garden that grew every conceivable variety of herbs and spices found in the small town of Thekkady and near by Kumily. Though the spice garden was colorful and vibrant with an abundance of heliconias, shoe flowers, balsams, bigonias, dahlias and bougainvillea flowers, this is my favorite shot from the hour long Spice trail.

A lone coconut tree towering through the mass of green, almost touching the blueness of the day sky. There was something about this tree trunk that made me stand around it, and peer at the tree through this angle.I soon realized that, if I cajoled it a little with the might of my palm, the whole tree coyly swayed from one side to another, the palm leaves tingling to the tips.Thin beams of sunlight were caught in the leaves, only to soon fall down as a shimmer.

If only all cajoling was this simple.
:)

Of that which my Nikon didn't capture.

His stately moustache seemed to fan out as his pleasant face creased into a smile when I appreciated his taste of music, safely tucked away in his glove compartment. He didn't speak much, but conveyed a sense of happy camaraderie to his co-passengers. After trekking in the Himachal for almost a week, with no mode of conveyance but feet, sitting in a jeep felt surreal and luxurious.

My stay in Solang was drawing to a close and I was doing my best to lap up everything I saw and sensed around me, and lock it all into some crevice of my head. The first two days had been reserved for acclimatization walks around our camp site. Trudging over huge stones, crossing over gushing rivers and gingerly walking a narrow, winding trail, had been anything but easy.

A foot slipped, a hand extended, a sun burn, some more sun block splattered.

A loose stone in the river bed...PLOP! Into the ice cold water! The sock irredeemably wet.

Panting up steep gradients. Power-stops only for sips of water and some more sun block.

Having acquired requisite 'trekking skills,' by day three, we found ourselves at the base camp in Dhundi. At the end of a six hour long trek, we found ourselves at a lovely tented camp site on the banks of the Beas. Bereft of most things that define my consumerist status, (cell phone, my i-pod, television) I didn't feel alone and bored. Life suddenly seemed to be brimming with little. I sincerely felt happy. There is a joy in less.

As the jeep glided down the narrow roads of Solang, with my moustached friend waving one hand to every other passer-by and using the other to deftly steer his vehicle, I wished I could make a mental imprint of everything to the last detail; the mountains, the green, the colorful people, the thin weightless air, the children in white and blue, the wild goats, the cane baskets, the smell of weed, the foot prints in snow, the blue sky, the white stone beds, the steaming hot momos, the quaint bridges, the arduous yet joyful treks, the hot mornings, the sweet tea, the cold nights, the soft tripping feet of the river....

There is a lot that my Nikon did not capture. But they remain...in some crevice.

"And then it seems that happiness, like peace or passion, comes most freely when it isn’t pursued." - Pico Iyer.

6398 ft above sea level

The perforated funnels of the air conditioning duct had been spitting cold spears all night long. As I absent-mindedly tried to stretch my frozen, numb legs, my knee jerked in pain as it hit the seat in front of me. Squinting open my eyes, I realized that for the last twelve hours I had been inside a ‘luxury’ Volvo bus scrambling up the mountains of Himachal. Moving the curtain on the tainted glass, I saw the dawn sky was still drenched in a deep gray. As the bus revved up its speed, the shadowy moon seemed to change its pallor and merge with the clusters of stars serenading it. In between steep gradients and hair pin bends, I saw the first silhouettes of the mountains. In the fifteen hour up hill road journey from Delhi to Manali, most of the kilometers are lapped up in the night. The break for tea, at five a.m. usually coincides with the mellow yet graceful change of lighting that sets into motion somewhere beyond the mountains. As I stepped out of the hostile chill of the Volvo, my numb fingertips tingled back to life as a breeze with a nip softly blew across.

The long rows of steps of the road side dhaba were beaded with colorful backpackers from the West; some feverishly brushing their teeth at the broken wash basin, some hunched over a cup of warm chai, others covered in a purple haze, sonorously singing Yellow Submarine. Made in aluminum kettles over kerosene stoves and served in glass tumblers, my first cup of tea in the mountains was hot and sweet. Filing back into the bus, we resumed our journey to Manali. As the sun slowly fanned out majestically in the speckless, blue sky, the obscure silhouettes gave way to a resplendent landscape of green, white and brown. Every two miles apart or so were rustic wooden and stone houses built on stilts with sloping roofs and tiny windows. The doorway, usually accessible by a wooden ladder, too was above ground level. Kullu and Manali are dotted with such houses, though nowadays, wood is giving way to cement and bricks. Mostly a hue of brown or red, snuggled in the valley, the houses look cozy with a lazy tail of smoke escaping out of most chimneys.

Kullu, which is forty-five kilometers en route to Manali, is a stopover for adventure sports for most tourists. People flock here for snow sports like skiing in the winters and other adventure sports like white water rafting and zorbiing during the summers. An hour and a half later, the bus finally entered the narrow streets of Manali. The abode of Manu, as the name literally means, no longer wears a demure, sleepy haven look. It is splattered with hotels of all sizes and colors on either sides of the road. Tucked in between the clutter that is the Manali market, are interesting, tiny eating joints and watering holes. Men and women wrapped up in shawls and jackets, sporting canvas shoes with a basket on their back, are a common sight on these streets. The bus arduously carried its bovine bulk through the narrow, crowded streets and finally halted in a bustling depot.

We stepped out to a bunch of eager ‘guides’ animatedly welcoming us to Manali and simultaneously rattling off a string of hotel and sightseeing options, available at affordable rates. So much for a heavenly abode! Before we could be accosted with more offers, we were quickly ferreted out of the bus into jeeps that were waiting to carry us to Solang Valley, situated thirteen kilometers from Manali. The morning sun was warm and a sweet smell of pine wafted through the Himalayan air.

I could already feel the vertigo of lightness.